In order to vote, comment or post rants, you need to confirm your email address.
You should have received a welcome email with a confirm link when you signed up. If you can't find the email, click the button below.

@AleCx04 its bullshit indeed, but its not just buzzwords, it actually is what they say. Dedicated chips for wallets. I do see a future in it. Imagine festival coins to be in an encrypted part of your phone. Or medical data for if you have an big accident, so paramedics already know what kind of things you are allergic for.

@Codex404 medical data can already be stored. I think that even my Samsung Corby had a feature for it back in the day.. now here in Belgium it's been standardized and centralized into the eID card (since 2002, making Belgium the first to implement this I think), eliminating further needs.

As for a hardware-based crypto wallet in the phone, that's something very promising. It should support common coins though and be versatile. But each one uses different crypto algorithms, making hardware backing at least for processing difficult.. hence why a Bitcoin ASIC can't be used for Ethereum etc. Storing them should be feasible though.. I mean all it has to be is pretty much just a glorified TPM that stores a private key.. heck, that's even similar to the chips on those ID cards which also store a private key.

So yeah, promising for sure but way too much buzz for what it is.

Disclaimer: I haven't looked up any of this and just went with preliminary knowledge of cryptocurrency, and how I would implement the "hardware wallet" feature.

@Condor there are hardware wallets already, they're basically just a small chip used to store your private keys and sign transactions when requested.

ASICs are just for mining - the algorithm used for the private/public key generation is not necessarily the same.
Plus, you don't need that much computational power, since signing transactions is a one-off process: any low-power cpu can easily do it (and maybe have a few hardware AES instructions for a speed boost).

That said, I don't really like the idea of a pre-included third party product dedicated to cryptography, especially if the hardware and software are not open sourced and allow you to check its secure implementation, so I'd say it's a bad idea on principle. There are multiple hardware wallets already on the market anyway.

@endor Yeah, most certainly. I mean chips in the eID cards that we've been using here in Belgium for over a decade now have been able to store private keys just fine. But indeed I wouldn't really trust a closed-source implementation either. Sure it's better than paper in ID papers and magstripes in bank cards, but far from ideal if it can't be readily scrutinized.

I'd personally prefer a hardware wallet in which at least the key can be reflashed on demand and the cryptographic scheme can be upgraded of. Also I'd want the chip to not be populated by default - I don't want the manufacturer to be able to know or even determine my private key because that defeats the whole point.

Perhaps a Wi-Fi, Bluetooth or NFC based hardware wallet would be better? That way the phone could communicate with the wallet, people can easily replace it and the hardware could be made open source without having to rely on phone manufacturers to do so, or to even include it to begin with.